Five Reasons to Invest In a Knowledge Base

It’s very common to find operations where the use of a knowledge base doesn’t exist. For example, in Brazil alone, as a point of reference, about 85 percent of the companies that hire a service management tool do not use a knowledge base or use it in a very poor way. In fact, day-to-day work makes us worry about re-establishing order or increasing the quality of service delivery, but nobody considers the gain that a well-constructed, shared and used knowledge base can provide.

Following the trend of evolution among generations, where we have now managed to solve most of our questions by accessing Google or watching videos on Youtube, the “Shift Left” concept has gained a lot of strength and knowledge management is strongly tied to it. Saying that we use the Shift Left method means that we are transferring knowledge to the left, or to the user, meaning that we increase the power of resolution of incidents by the user without any previous knowledge without the intervention of the service desk. But for this to happen naturally, you need to focus on three key points:

Public: Knowledge lost in documents or in people’s heads reflects directly on the efficiency of the customer care.

Shared: Encourage the team to share information, including the end user, when possible.

Review: It’s no use of making a good public document shareable if it’s already outdated or obsolete.

Ok, but how can I start improving my knowledge base from scratch?

1 – Structure

At first, creating multiple documents in any way is not effective because many of these documents may never be used. Try to structure a process where the analyst can identify if the call could be solved by the requestor himself or only by a technical analyst. If the analyst can’t create the document at the moment of the resolution of the call, he creates “flags” that will identify that this call has a content to be transformed into knowledge.

2 – Create knowledge items

Once we have lots of calls “tagged,” we can begin creating call knowledge items that have a great impact or if it is time-consuming to analysts. Take time to set aside time for document creation. Encourage teamwork, and even create incentive campaigns.

3 – Stipulate parameters

After some time working on the creation of knowledge items, stipulate a new parameter for your operation: every solved call must have a linked knowledge item.

Of course, there is no way to be 100 percent assertive, but with time and maturity of the team, the ratio will increase. This will in the future allow new analysts to level their own knowledge based on the experience of previous resolutions.

4 – Share the Knowledge

Any call that can be solved without the presence of a technical analyst and that already has a document with a previous explanation, should be sent to the user. Introduce and stimulate in your company the ease of self-service. Surely there will be some resistance, but if the document is really well written and sent quickly, the user tends to accept it easier.

5 – Review your base

And last but not least, review the documents every once in a while. Create measures to evaluate the use of documents. Find out if they really are effective in solving the user’s difficulties.

Nancy Van Elsacker is the president of TOPdesk US, currently responsible for leading the division’s business development, client acquisition and customer services efforts. Prior to launching TOPdesk’s North American division in 2015, she led the organization’s expansion efforts in Belgium for eight years and was responsible for the startup and expansion of TOPdesk’s operations there. TOPdesk develops, markets, implements and supports standard user-friendly service management software for IT, facilities management, HR, maintenance, complaints registration and the service desk for all sized organizations.